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Nov 08, 2023

Oddities to You, Treasures to Mark Dion

Advertisement Supported by Show Us Your Wall By Hilarie M. Sheets The artist

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Show Us Your Wall

By Hilarie M. Sheets

The artist Mark Dion's home-cum-studio in Upper Manhattan conjures the vision of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, those "wonder rooms" crammed with eccentric treasures before the age of museums. The walls and bookcases of the apartment he shares with his wife, the artist Dana Sherwood, and their baby, are teeming with taxidermy animals, antique prints of flora and fauna, shells, cages, oil cans and tools, as well as books and field guides. The unruly display betrays Mr. Dion's fascination with natural history and scientific methodologies, which he investigates in his own meticulously ordered art installations.

Mr. Dion, 55, just reimagined the laboratory of the early-20th-century plant hunter David Fairchild for the Kampong botanical garden in Miami. This week, he installed an array of found kitchen objects, including fillet knives and poultry shears, as surgical implements for the set of "Anatomy Theater," a macabre opera that he wrote with the composer David Lang (it opens Saturday at BRIC Arts Media Ballroom in Brooklyn). Following are edited excerpts from our conversation.

How deliberate are these arrangements that seem so haphazard?

I love to accumulate but not necessarily order. As you can see, some of the books are arranged in a pretty precarious way. I try to get away from the fussiness of collecting and talk more about exuberance. You might find a book about bicycles next to a book about birds next to a book about shells next to a book about space exploration. It's the closest thing to self-portraiture that I could imagine, because these objects are the real things I use every day. They’re the tools I use to develop my own ideas.

When did you begin to collect avidly?

As a child, it was very undisciplined. I come from a blue-collar background in New Bedford, Mass., and I grew up in a household without books, but I was always collecting seaside things. Now I’m pretty rigorous about collecting. Every weekend, I’m at the flea market. Pretty much every day, I stop into thrift shops and antique stores and Goodwills. It's a long battle to acquire the materials that have the right kind of patina.

In this bookcase, it looks like an army of misshapen chess pieces.

Those are finials you would screw onto the top of a lamp or tie onto the end of a cord for Venetian blinds. I think the form is impeccable and love the idea that one would invest that much energy into making this completely obscure detail so elaborate. I find them in wood, metal, Bakelite and early plastics, which have aged in such a way that they appear like the most exquisite ivory.

They give me the impression almost of a cemetery. As a child, I spent a lot of time in old New England cemeteries, wandering around the tombstones, looking at the design and shape and arrangement of these things.

You have a lot of groupings by category — antique scissors, hot-water bottles, miniature cake molds.

There's a comparison you make between objects, but it's not the kind of comparison you find in a history or archaeology museum. There's this subtle variety in form, which I find really inspiring.

How much has the history of cabinets of curiosities informed this environment?

Without really consciously designing my home to be a cabinet of curiosities, it functions in the way that they functioned. Each collection was idiosyncratically organized and had its own cosmology and worldview. There are artists who live in their heads and find looking at white walls inspiring. But I like to surround myself with things. These collections are really generative for me.

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